Chapter 6. Beginnings

Credits

Chapter 6 of the author's Navvyman, which Coracle Press published in 1983. It appears in the Victorian Web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.

Directions

Numbers in brackets indicate page breaks in the print edition and thus allow users of VW to cite or locate the original page numbers.

Text in italics contains the words of the author's father, who became a navvy in 1903.

Non-bibliographic notes appears as text links.

The source of much of the material should be clear from the text. If the name of a single-work author (like Barrett, or Anna Tregelles,
or Katie Marsh) is mentioned in the text, the title of the book can be
picked out from the bibliography.

Navvies, navvying and English canals (it can be no surprise) were
exactly coeval: men who began on the Bridgewater as labourers left
it as Navigators, tramping away to spend the rest of their lives
digging waterways.
'I've been a canal cutter upward of forty years,' said John Walker
in 1801, the first professional navvy we know about. 'I worked
upon the Duke of Bridgewater's Canal, and since have worked
upon several.'
The last canals and the earliest railways overlapped in time and, at
a guess, five to ten thousand canal makers overlapped with them.
Richard Pearce, who made the crossing, began on the Lancaster
canal the year before Waterloo and worked through to the Great
Western Railway and beyond. He'd found work pretty easily over
the years he said in 1846, though you were better off in the old days.

It's very unlikely canal men worked on the Stockton-Darlington,
almost as unlikely they worked on the Manchester-Liverpool
(where they were mainly local or Irish), but it's certain they worked
on the London-Birmingham where, it was said by Lecount, they
were too few to spread their usual havoc.

Twentieth-century navvies thought their canal forebears were
fenmen, people accustomed to controlling slow flowing water.
Some were, probably, though most must have been farm labourers,
picked up when the canal neared them. William Mylne, an engineer
who worked on waterways into the 1830s, never hired finished
navvies but recruited the rawstock from the countryside. His
rustics, he admitted, were slow and awkward but he paid them little
and when they grew proficient and ran off to the railways (it took a
year a turn a labourer into a navvy) he recruited more.

Like the canals, the railways recruited bucolic hard men when the
une neared their parishes, usually men too drunken and disrespectful to be hired by farmers. ('They appeared to me,' said a contractor, [45/46]
in the '30s, 'the same as a dog that had been tied up for a week. They
seemed to go out of their way to commit outrageous acts.') Farms
and the countryside, in fact, were always good recruiting grounds
even after navvying became partly self-supplying, particularly in
the great agricultural collapse of the '80s.

By the '80s, as well, Cardwell's army reforms were working
through and old soldiers young enough for navvying were being
released from the colours. They became quite common on public
works with their give-away nicknames like Soldier and Gunner. [Edward Cardwell, Secretary of State for War, reorganised the infantry into
county regiments in which men could serve for six years, instead of lifetime.]

A swarthy navvy called Soldier drew his shilling a day pension in
a quarterly lump in Gravesend in July 1883 and boozed it away in
his regular fashion, ending foodless, moneyless and kitless in
Boston a month later. Joe Chapham took him home and gave him
tommy and lodgings, until Soldier robbed his fellow-lodgers of
£3-3-8d and stole Jethro Bird's jacket, moleskin trousers, handker-
chief and waistcoat (all good). Jethro said: 'He turned out
respectable in mv rigs, and has skinned me.' (Jethro had no room to
talk — he was later expelled from the Christian Excavators' Union
for buying things on credit and sloping.)

Rarer was the upper class drop-out, generally a drunk, often
strangely reminiscent of a failed remittance man: failed in that
nobody was going to pay him to go to the farthermost colonies and
never return. Men like the Oxford double first Mrs Hunter of
Hunterston met at the Dairy dam near Paisley. 'Look at that
shovel,' said the navvy, a dark middle-aged man, 'I'm actually fond
of it, for by tomorrow night it will have earned me ten shillings, and
then I can go and have a drink.'
'We have known,' said the Illustrated London News in 1854, 'two
surgeons (very drunken fellows) working as navvies.' They also
knew of a footman who ran away to navvy on the Lincolnshire
Railway, only to suffocate in mud at the New Holland Pier.

Before all that, however, there were two other big navvy-making
factors, the new Poor Laws and the Hungry Forties. The trade
recession which made the '40s so hungry began throwing thousands
of mill hands out of work in the mid-'30s, just as the earliest
railways were scrabbling about for labour: out-of-work spinners,
redundant weavers, it made no odds as long as they weren't too
gaunt to pick up a pick and shovel. Up to fifty thousand unwanted
[46/47]
hands, it's thought, went straight from their mills to the
railways: Manchester-Sheffield, Selby-Hull, Chester-Crewe, Bolton-Preston, Preston-Fleetwood, North Midland, Midland Counties. Many stayed with public works, becoming so good that for a
long time a lot of people thought only north-countrymen could be
navvies: if your vowels were soft you must be a labourer.

The 1835 Poor Law was perhaps a less drastic way of creating
navvies but it was longer lasting. It was meant to simplify the maze
of parish-by-parish relief schemes which had grown up, entwining
the whole country like clinging ivy, ever since King Henry closed
the monasteries and with them their alms for the poor. Things had
got into a pretty mess by the 1830s. In 1835 Edward Gulson, who
did some prying for the Commissioners in the still un-Unionised
parishes of Oxfordshire, reported that rate-receivers lived better
than rate-payers. One woman even paid the parish to let her lodge
in the poorhouse where paupers ate meat daily. A gang of fit men,
paid by the parish to mend roads, played pitch and hustle with the
parish's money and took paid leave to go bull-baiting.

The new Poor Law changed all that. The new system was both
unified and rigid. At the top it was run from London by paid
Commissioners. Locally it was run by elected Boards of Guardians,
generally petty tradesmen with a vested interest in being stingy to
the poor. Parishes were lumped together into Unions the better to
support the new brick workhouses which, like jails, were meant to
deter, not attract; to break, not protect. Only the utterly desperate
and beaten would live in them.

Some, seeing the game was up, chose to look for work: others
were forced to. Many trekked to the new railways. The Guardians
in Halstead, in Essex, clashed with their paupers over the winter of
1835-6 when the poor rioted and fired wheat ricks. Some were
locked away in the new workhouse, confident that farmers had to
give them work if they wanted it. Others trod the tread-mill in the
House of Correction. Either way by next mid-summer the poor
were broken and were trudging away from their homes. Twenty
went to the Southampton Railway.

For a time Richard Muggeridge, the Commissioners' migration
officer in Manchester, shipped whole families of southern farm
labourers along the canals into the cotton towns. When the Hungry
Forties set in, he diversified out of cotton into bleaching,
paper-making, and railways. Striplings, he wrote, were no good for
railway work: budding navvies had to be young, unmarried, but
47/48] past their unmuscled youth.

At the same time a circular letter sent to the Boards of Guardians
alongside the London-Birmingham reminded them that here was a
good way of getting rid of their unwanted poor. In response, the
Select Vestry at Hemel Hempstead persuaded the railway company
to hire a whole gang of its paupers. The Vestry found the tools, but
the paupers couldn't find the energy and they all left in a few days.
Others, on the other hand, stuck it out, Francis Giles, an ex-canal
engineer, was very pleased with his paupers on the Newcastle-Carlisle: with good gangers he'd match them against any navigator.
Many became navigators themselves.

At first, when most people thought only north-countrymen were
real navvies, most navvies were from the north. By the 1880s, on the
other hand, most new navvies were southerners (more men always
became navvies than were born navvies.) Roughly eighty per cent
were English. Ten per cent were Irish. Five per cent were Scots, five
per cent Welsh. This number has been worked out from names printed in the dead and hurt lists of the Navvy Mission Society, 1880-1914. At least three navvies were black. Six-Fingered Jack died in Malmesbury workhouse, aged 79, in the summer of 1902. Another black man, from the Elan Valley dams, died of exposure in the hills above Rhayader in 1897. A third worked on the Ballachulish railway a year or so later.

In 1793 Sir Charles Morgan tabled a motion in the House of
Commons which would have banned canal digging at harvest time
when navvies were needed to help get in the corn. Most MPs
opposed it. 'Mr Dent,' said the Morning Chronicle, 'said there were
hundreds of people who came from Scotland and from Ireland, for
the purpose only of working in canals, and who knew nothing of
corn harvest.' Since Mr Dent says 'hundreds' and the canals were
built by thousands perhaps the Irish ten per cent was steady from
the beginning. It seems to be true of the first railways. 'On these
works,' says the 1841 Census in Ireland, 'it has been supposed by
one of the leading engineers in England, that the Irish labourers did
not at any time exceed five thousand or one-tenth the whole.'

In 1854 the Illustrated London News made a point of how many
Irish soldiers there were and how few Irish navigators. They put it
down to the potato eating habit which they thought weakened men
too much for navvying.
The Irish clung together so that on a few jobs they were either in a
large minority or even a small majority. Missionaries complained
about it. Two-thirds of the men on the Cray dam near Swansea in
[48/49]
1900 were Irish. Three-quarters of those at the Alwen dam a few
years later were both Irish and Catholic. Even as early as 1851
twenty-six per cent of the men working around the Knaresborough
viaduct on the East and West Riding Junction were Irish. (The rest
were English. A quarter of all of them were local.)

Statistics about the origins of people on Pennine Railways have
been worked out from the census returns for 1851, 1861, 1871.

1851: the second Woodhead tunnel, Malton and Driffield railway, Leeds and Thirsk Railway

Ninety-two per cent were English. Four per cent were Irish.
Three per cent were Scots. Only one per cent was Welsh (and most
of them were on the Carlisle-Settle line where they totalled nearly
five per cent of the whole. Most, probably, were miners in the line's
several tunnels).
Nearly half the Englishmen were northerners of one sort or
another. The eastern counties, the midlands, and the southern
counties each contributed around 14 per cent of the English
contingent. Only 2 per cent came from the far west of England,
though again they congregated in sizeable minorities in a few
places: 14 per cent of the Englishmen on the Carlisle-Settle came
from the south-west — probably Devon and Cornish miners in the
tunnels.

Most Irish navvies were English-speaking Ulster Catholics, a fact
not always appreciated even at the time. (The Irish Society once sent
Irish-speaking Protestant scripture readers to work among them.)
They were different both from the Irish who came seasonally for
the sheep-shearing and the harvest, and the Glasgow-Irish who in
mid-century were about to become Scots. Most Irish navvies
tended to stick to the north, fanning out from their ports of entry,
Liverpool and Glasgow.

Burke and Hare, the body snatchers, were both Ulster Catholics
who worked on the Edinburgh-Glasgow Union Canal for a short
time around 1818. Burke was a labourer's son from County
Tyrone. Hare came from Newry and worked on the canal at West
Port where a man called Logue had a gang of Irishmen and a lodging
house. Logue's wife, Lucky, navvied on the canal as well, dressed as
a man. [49/50]

'The land of Donegal is bare and hungry,' said Patrick MacGill
who was born there in 1890, 'and nobody can make a decent
livelihood except landlords.' His priest, a pot-bellied little man with
sparkling false teeth and a taste for good cigars and first class
railway travel, put curses on most of his parishoners. Seven curses
to begin with, for dancing. 'May you have one eye and it be
squinting. May you have one tooth and it be aching.'
He used the people's fear of him, said MacGill, to extort money.
He built himself a house with a lavatory when nobody else knew
what a lavatory was (a place for storing holy water, somebody
thought). 'He wants another pound for his new house at once,'
MacGill's father once told his family. 'I'm over three weeks behind,
and if he puts a curse on me this time what am I to do at all, at all.'

MacGill was 'sold' when he was still a child to a bigoted
Orangeman for five shillings a week wages and the same food as the
pigs, only less. In 1905 he crossed to Scotland for the potato
picking, lost his money gambling, and was too ashamed to go home
to Donegal. He met Moleskin Joe, an English navvy. Together they
worked at the Kinlochleven dam where MacGill became a writer
and gave up navvying.

The Irish were cast out even by the outcast navvy: they were the
minority within the minority, the outsiders inside the outsiders.
Although they made up only ten per cent of the whole, the Irish
were the common factor in about a third of navvy riots. The Irish
put it down to bigotry. In 1839 the Liverpool Mercury reported that
an Irish navvy called Peter McDonough had been defrauded of his
wages at Ellesmere Port by a hagman called Isaac Dean. 'After I was
employed by Dean,' McDonough told the newspaper, 'it was often
hinted to me that I ought to consider myself a fortunate kind of
Irish animal because I was not driven from the place with sticks or
stones, as many of my countrymen had been before my coming, for
no other reason than being Irish. I witnessed a few of these Irishmen
hunts since I came. One poor fellow, who got employment, and
began work, was attacked in a dreadful manner; he ran, and was
pursued by them with stones, etc. from which he received a severe
cut on the head; his coat, after taking from it a case of razors and a
comb, they rolled up with hot bricks.'

Prejudice, as well, was the motive the Irish gave for the riot which
drove them off the Lancaster-Preston railway in 1859. Michael
Donahue, a tall spare man, was eating bread and cheese outside the
Green Dragon in Calgate when the mob came. Somebody stole a
[50/51]
tool from him and beat with a knobbed ash plant. He tried to run
away, he told the magistrates. 'I went over a field, and went into a
road, and found Rough Lane, and I got tally-ho there. There was
another with him in a blue waistcoat. They chased me round the
house, and tore my coat and took away my pocket, and my
handkerchief with half a sovereign in it. They struck at me, and
pulled my coat to pieces.'

Donahue, humiliated and shaken, his coat in tatters, crept away,
then made his way to what he thought would be safety in Lancaster.
Except Rough Lane somehow got there before him. 'Damn you,
why don't you cut?' Rough Lane shouted at him, beating him with
his fists.

John Trainor, a stout man with only a slight Irish accent, was
lamed at Calgate and limped into the witness box. 'They beat me
over my head and body,' he told the court, 'they hurt me very
much. I begged for my life, and they ordered me to get up, and I
walked with them. If I did not walk fast enough they prodded me
on with their sticks.'
He was pushed into a crowd of Englishmen, 'Pitch into the
bastard,' they shouted. 'What fetched you here?'
'I said we came for work wherever it was. They said they did not
allow Irish. They asked me if I would be off the ground, when they
were leathering me, and I said I believe I must, as I was not able to
work. They said they would not have any of us.'

But there was more to it than pure prejudice. Between the Irish
and the Scots it was often religious: Reformation vs Counter-Reformation, Calvin vs Pope by proxy. Money, more often than not, was the reason the heathen English attacked the Irish. The English, said the Liverpool Journal in 1839, entertained a general opinion that they (the Irish) flocked too numerously to their country, and by accepting of a rate of wages below the English
standard, reduced their value in the labour market.'
'We are all starving,' the destitute navvy in Cripplegate told
Henry Mayhew. 'We are all willing to work, but it ain't to be had.
This country is getting very bad for labour: it's so overrun with
Irish that the Englishman hasn't a chance in his own land to live.'

(The Irish did have their champions. In 1846 Thomas Carlyle
watched navvies on the Caledonian Railway. 'I have not in my
travels seen anything uglier than that disorganic mass of labourers,
sunk three-fold deeper in brutality by the three-fold wages they are
getting. The Yorkshire and Lancashire men, I hear are reckoned the
[51/52]
worst, and not without glad surprise, I find the Irish are the best in
point of behaviour. The postmaster tells me several of the poor Irish
do regularly apply to him for money drafts, and send their earnings
home. The English, who eat twice as much beef, consume the
residue in whisky, and do not trouble the postmaster.')

'As far as my experience goes,' said the Sheriff of Edinburgh, also
in 1846, 'in Scotland we have not yet any of the class of people called
navigators; they are generally merely labourers, who come for the
occasion and probably do not return to that work afterwards.' But
though few turned navvy, a lot of Scotsmen did labour on public
works in Scotland. The Caledonian Canal was built mainly by
Highlanders with only a stiffening of regular navvies from the
south. In the 1840s Scotsmen on Scottish railways came from
lowland farms and highland crofts, where they went back when the
job was done. Just before the Great War many of the gangers on the
Kinlochleven dam were bilingual in English and Gaelic. The Gaels
went home when the dam was built. (Earlier, they were apt to go at
any time: for the herring fishing, the potato harvest, peat cutting.
The herring season has been most abundant,' Telford wrote from
the Caledonian canal in 1818, 'and the return of the fine weather
will enable the indolent Highland creature to get their plentiful
crops and have a glorious spell at the whisky-making.')

The Welsh, too, usually only took to navvying when navvying
came to them, one result of which was they were normally less
violent. They at least belonged somewhere. A scripture reader on
the Holyhead line said he'd never seen navvies like them: they never
lost even an hour's pay through drunkenness and paid cash for
Bibles, even the five shilling ones. 'I've seen in a common labourer's
purse,' said the missionary, 'two and three and more sovereigns,
and silver.' Most, on the Holyhead line, were miners. Many were monoglot
Welsh speakers. Few were illiterate. (At the Vyrnwy dam in the
1880s the store keeper sold twenty Welsh-language books a week,
against none in English. Three-quarters of the Vyrnwy men were
Welsh.)

Not that they were entirely faultless. On Whit Monday, 1846,
James Webb was drinking his quart of ale among a crowd of navvies
outside a tommy shop near Bangor on the Chester-Holyhead when
somebody suggested, in Welsh, they amputate his bloody ears.
They should in fact prune the ears of every English bugger to
distinguish them from Welshmen. Webb, after being kicked and
[52/53]
knocked down, found his ear had been cut, not off, but in two, and
he had been stabbed in the head with a pen-knife.

Full-scale rioting broke out there as well one Friday towards the
end of May at the beginning of the long sun-dried summer of 1846.
Local Welsh labourers, jealous so many Irishmen were employed,
drove them out of Penmaenmawr and marched on westwards,
clearing the line of Irish until they reached the Llandegai tunnel
which runs under Bangor. Half climbed to the shafts, the rest
skirted the hill into town, passing the lock-up and the courthouse of
the Rev James Vincent, the magistrate.
Vincent, who'd scrutinised the rioters with disfavour as he rode
from his home near Aber earlier that morning, sent a
snatch-squad of constables to arrest a ringleader as he marched by
his courtroom window. As the police dragged their leader into the
jail-room behind the court, the mob turned on Vincent, hitting him
in the face, jeering at him as he read the Riot Act. At the same time
the ringleader walked out of his unlocked cell and over the wall,
climbing a ladder he found in the backyard. The Durham Light
Infantry sailed from Liverpool in steamboats. The mob went back
to work. [55/56]

Sources

[Note: Full citations for works cited by the name of the author or a short title can be found in the bibliography.]

Walker said he became a navvy on the Bridgewater in Pinkerton's
Abstract of the Cause. Richard Pearce spoke to the 1846
Committee. The origins of men on the Liverpool-Manchester is
from J H Clapham, An Economic History of Modern Britain: The
Early Railway Age, 1820-50. The original source is a pamphlet
written by the London and Midland Railway rebutting criticism made in the Octoberober
1832 number of the Edinburgh Review. The pamphlet is called An
Answer by the Directors of the L&MR to an Article in the
Edinburgh Review. Mylne is from Brees.

The contractor who compared navvies to dogs spoke to the 1846
Committee. That the great agricultural slump of the 1880s was a
navvy-recruiter is from an article John Ward wrote for Justice, one
of a series called "Sketches of Labour Life," 16 and 23 June 1888.

Soldier and Jethro Bird are from Quarterly Letter to Navvies 21, September 1885. Mrs Hunter
and the Oxford double-first is from Our Navvies. The inebriate
surgeons and the mud-drowned footmen are from Illustrated London News 30 December
1854. Gulson's prying is from PRO MH 32/28. How the Poor Law
drove men into navvying is from the Second and Third Annual
Reports of the Poor Law Commissioners — Parliamentary Reports
Vol XXIX part i, 1836: and Vol XXXI, 1837. Halstead's problems
are from the Second Annual Report, Appendix B, page 242.
Muggeridge and the domestic migration scheme are from the same
Appendix, page 417. Hemel Hempstead's pauper gang, and the
paupers on the Newcastle-Carlisle, are from Brees.

Sir Charles Morgan and Mr Dent were reported in The Times and
Morning Chronicle on April 1793. Mr Courtenay was covered only
by that morning's Times. The percentage of Irish navvies is from the
Census of Ireland 1841, Parliamentary Papers 1843, Vol XXIV.

The paucity of Irish navvies, compared to Irish soldiers, is from
the Illustrated London News. Complaints that the Irish took over some jobs are from
various Annual Reports of the Navvy Mission
Society. The origins of the men at the
Knaresborough viaduct are from J A Patmore, "A Navvy Gang of
1851," Journal of Transport History, Vol 5, 1969. The analysis of the
whooping cough on the Great Central are from Quarterly Letter to Navvies 74, December 1896.

Census Returns is from D Brooke's "Railway Navvies on the
Pennines" in Journal of Transport History, Vol 3, 1975.

Six-Fingered Jack is mentioned in the NL: the black navvy who
died above the Elan is from the Montgomery and Radnor Echo. The
black man at Ballaculish is from Kennedy.

The fact that Irish navvies were mainly Catholic Ulstermen is
from the 1846 Committee. MacGill's experiences are from Children
of the Dead End. McDonough's complaint appeared in the
Liverpool Mercury 8 Nov 1839. The Lancaster-Carlisle riot is from
the Lancaster Gazette 29 September 1838. English navvies' conviction
that the Irish undercut wages is from the Liverpool journal 12 October
1839.

Carlyle's preference for Irish navvies is from a letter to Gavan
Duffy (dated 29 August 1846) as reprinted in R W Wilson's "Genesis
and Growth of the Caledonian Railway" in the Railway Magazine,
June 1907.

The Sheriff of Edinburgh spoke to the 1846 Committee. The
bilingual Scotsmen at Kinlochleven are referred to in a booklet put
out by the British Aluminium Corporation. The recruiting of
Scottish labour for the Lancaster canal, through ads. in north of the
Border papers, is from the Lancaster Canal Committee Book, 23
October 1792.

Welsh-language bookselling at Vyrnwy is from the NL. The
battle of Webb's ear is from the Chester Courant June 1846. The
Penmaenmawr and Bangor riots are from the same newspaper, 27
May and 3 June 1846.